America's Mental Health System:Jail

[jps]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8735116.htm?1c

The voices are relentless. They insult him, threaten him, tell him to slit his wrists. Raymond Santos is 30 years old and exhausted, run ragged for most of his life by a biochemical tempest in his mind.

A year ago, he grew so desperate for the voices to shut up that he tried to appease them by taking a large, serrated kitchen knife and digging it four inches into his stomach. Two weeks later, with 31 staples in his abdomen, he landed in Florida's largest psychiatric facility.

The Miami-Dade County Jail.

He was locked up in a wing where psychotic inmates sleep on the tile floor or rusted metal bed frames, without sheets, blankets or mattresses. They stay in their cells for 24 hours a day. No books, no TV, no visitors, no toothbrush, no eating utensils, no clothes.

They screech and cower at unseen demons. They pace furiously and rip their paper gowns off. They urinate on the floor and bathe in the toilet.

The noise never stops, the fluorescent lights mask the passing of days, and the psychiatrist treats patients through a three-inch-wide ''chow hatch'' in a steel door.

''I don't even try to describe to people what's going on up here,'' said Dr. Joseph Poitier, the jail psychiatrist. ``It's beyond talking about.''

The scene is just one consequence of a nationwide failure to care for the severely mentally ill, a situation created over the last 40 years by the closing of psychiatric hospitals in Florida and other states.

I didn't know things were this bad and they aren't everywhere, but the treatment of the mentally ill in the US overall is terrible.
The fact that an article like this isn't worthy of being national news attests to that.
It seems obvious to me that this is an intolerable situation, but since its been going on for quite some time, perhaps there's not a consensus on that point, would anyone argue that this is just a necessary consequence of having private health care? or that it is rather a matter of priorites, something that we just can't afford to deal with?

This situation has a number of possible remedies, from laws requiring that states provide treatment for the mentally ill to national health care. The problem is that the people who suffer from the current situation are in no position to push for change.

 

[Mystech]

You're right, this is truly sickening and disturbing. It's the sort of thing that I'd expect from a conservative state, however. Law enforcement, and treatment of prisoners (and this is in no way related to anything in Gitmo or Iraq) is often made a mess by conservative policies. They often simply draw a black and white line between criminal and law abiding citizen, and don't let anything else steer their judgement in how each should be treated. They treat criminals with a callousness that boarders on sociopathy; I'm sure that others on this forum will be able to drag up articles about mentally feeble Texans sentencing mentally disabled criminals to death row.

A similar case came up in Arizona not so long ago, when we passed a state law that allows all Minors ages 15 and over to be tried as adults for felony charges (I believe that is the case, I'll have to look up the exact specifications for what crimes they are to be tried as adults). Personally I found this to be outrageous. A 15 year old does not have the same mental faculties as an adult, physically their brains aren't even fully developed, can't we wait until their poor little cerebellums are all there before expecting them to be held to the same standards of conduct as an adult?

A lot of this nation's standards for sentencing and punishment are just absurd.

 

[jps]

You're right, this is truly sickening and disturbing. It's the sort of thing that I'd expect from a conservative state, however. Law enforcement, and treatment of prisoners (and this is in no way related to anything in Gitmo or Iraq) is often made a mess by conservative policies. They often simply draw a black and white line between criminal and law abiding citizen, and don't let anything else steer their judgement in how each should be treated. They treat criminals with a callousness that boarders on sociopathy; I'm sure that others on this forum will be able to drag up articles about mentally feeble Texans sentencing mentally disabled criminals to death row.

The only thing I disagree with here is that its in no way related to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq or Guantanamo. The mentality that allows for the strict line between criminals and law-abiders also allows for the strict line between us and them.
Perhaps the worst part is that in addition to being callous and borderline sociopathic, its also counterproductive. Someone who goes to jail for an inconsequential offense is likely to come out with a deep resentment of the government and law, in addition to being unhirable as an ex-con.
The conservative approach to justice is self-justifying as it says "here's a person who has no respect for society, so society needs to brutalize them" then having been brutalized, the person comes out having no respect for society, proving that the conservative approach was correct.

When this criminal-creation system is used on those who commit illegal acts as a direct result of serious mental illness, as in the first example in that article, its especially heinous as it amounts to criminalizing their illness and punishing them by making it worse.

A similar case came up in Arizona not so long ago, when we passed a state law that allows all Minors ages 15 and over to be tried as adults for felony charges (I believe that is the case, I'll have to look up the exact specifications for what crimes they are to be tried as adults). Personally I found this to be outrageous. A 15 year old does not have the same mental faculties as an adult, physically their brains aren't even fully developed, can't we wait until their poor little cerebellums are all there before expecting them to be held to the same standards of conduct as an adult?

A lot of this nation's standards for sentencing and punishment are just absurd.

The trend towards trying minors as adults is absurd. What's the point of having juvenile courts if they're not used whenever a serious crime is involved? If a crime doesn't have a serious punishment to begin with, there's no need to treat the juvenile differently.